SPEAKER PELOSI LED A GOOD FIGHT TO OVERTURN BUSH'S VETO BUT... THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS

Today while I was putting my socks on I noticed CNN had a couple of senators on TV to talk about the veto, Jack Reed, a sensible Democrat from Rhode Island, and then some sniveling partisan hack from Nevada, Ensign. Ensign was incapable of saying a single unscripted word. Every single utterance that came out of his pie-hole was pure Rove propaganda... just one distortion after another. That's Bush's Congress-- and that's how we got into the horrible mess we're in now after Bush's theft of the presidential election in 1999. Americans need to be more vigilant about those kinds of things in the future. Don'tcha think?

As of this week barely one third of Americans side with Bush on his veto battle with Congress. Nearly 60% of Americans want timelines in the funding bill. Nancy Pelosi's post-veto speech today was magnificent and well worth watching.



"The President said that we are substituting, Congress is substituting our judgment for the judgment of commanders in the field, 6,000 miles away. Wrong again, Mr. President. We are substituting our judgment for your judgment, 16 blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House. We are substituting the judgment of this Congress for your failed judgment. The American people have lost faith in the President's conduct of the war. They have said they want accountability and a new direction-- this bill gives them both."

Other Democrats also spoke eloquently and sensibly about Bush's incompetence and malevolence, including freshman Tim Walz (D-MN) and Lloyd Doggett (D-TX). Waltz: "Yesterday the President vetoed only the second bill that has ever come to his desk. He called it 'a prescription for chaos and confusion.' I ask, how is that different from what we have now?" Doggett: "In this administration, Generals who disagree with the President earn a new title: 'Retired.'"

Which is what this commander-in-chief should be. Instead of joining Democrats in trying to do what's best for America, partisan hacks in the Republican caucus dug in their heels and sustained Bush's veto. Using Rovian buzz words to confuse and distort some of the worst characters on the American political scene, like bribery chief Jerry Lewis (R-CA) urged that Republicans vote to sustain. "Now is not the time for the United States to back down in its war on terror," he mouthed. The attempt to override-- which needs a two-thirds majority in each house, had 222 voting to override and 203 voting to sustain. The 7 Democrats who voted for Bush's and Cheney's war without end were:

* John Barrow (GA)
* Dan Boren (OK)
*Lincoln Davis (TN)
* Jim Marshall (GA)
*Jim Matheson (UT)
* Michael McNulty (NY)
* Gene Taylor (MS)